Denmark, 1813–1855
Søren Kierkegaard
Danish thinker often called the first existentialist. Explored anxiety, despair, and the leap of faith — what it costs to become a self before God.
Søren Kierkegaard in 27 lines
Every Søren Kierkegaard passage in thinkr's library, with the theme each one speaks to.
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
“Faith is the highest passion in a human being.”
“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”
“Don't forget to love yourself.”
“There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys; they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked out the sum for themselves.”
“God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but He does what is still more wonderful: He makes saints out of sinners.”
“Seek first God's Kingdom, that is, become like the lilies and the birds, become perfectly silent — then shall the rest be added unto you.”
“It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.”
“To stand on one leg and prove God's existence is a very different thing from going on one's knees and thanking Him.”
“What is asked of a man that he may be able to pray for his enemies? To pray for one's enemies is the hardest thing of all. That is why it exasperates us so much in our present day situation.”
“Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself.”
“Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic — if it is pulled out I shall die.”
“Father in heaven, when the thought of thee awakens in our soul, let it not waken as an agitated bird which flutters confusedly about, but as a child waking from sleep with a celestial smile.”
“The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins.”
“The similarity between Christ and Socrates consists essentially in their dissimilarity. Just as philosophy begins with doubt, so also a life that may be called human begins with irony.”
“Socrates did not stop with a philosophical consideration of mankind; he addressed himself to each one individually, wrested everything from him, and sent him away empty-handed.”
“The Sophist demonstrates that everything is true and nothing is true.”
“The world is rejuvenated, but as Heine so wittily remarked, it was rejuvenated by romanticism to such a degree that it became a baby again.”
“Concepts, like individuals, have their histories, and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals.”
“Irony is a qualification of subjectivity.”
“Irony limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields truth, actuality, content; it disciplines and punishes and thereby yields balance and consistency.”
“How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.”
“Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate.”
“Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.”
“If the ethical – that is, social morality – is the highest ... then no categories are needed other than the Greek philosophical categories.”
“The question is asked in ignorance, by one who does not even know what can have led him to ask it.”
Where Søren Kierkegaard lands on a hard choice
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what a position does when it meets a situation where every option costs something.
Your workplace rewards a version of you that feels false.
You are taking ownership of your participation. The risk is confusing every constraint with oppression.
You have to decide before you feel certain.
You are accepting that action often precedes proof. The danger is dressing impulse as courage.
The evidence is discouraging, but hope keeps returning.
You are allowing possibility to matter before proof arrives. The danger is confusing hope with exemption from reality.
A promise you made sincerely no longer fits who you are.
You are choosing the honest rupture over the slow one. The danger is a freedom that leaves someone else holding the bill.
The work is good and you keep finding reasons to hold it.
You are naming the thing holding the work rather than the work's flaws. The danger is self-diagnosis used as another form of delay.
You finally have free hours and you waste every one of them.
You are reading the behaviour as a message rather than a failure. The danger is interpreting instead of beginning.
A grief has not moved in a long time and people expect it to.
You are refusing to pathologise a continuing attachment. The cost is a life organised around a room you will not leave.
You are deciding whether to bring someone into this world.
You are admitting the decision exceeds what deliberation can settle. The danger is calling avoidance a leap.
Lessons that quote Søren Kierkegaard
- Kierkegaard & the Individual — The first existentialist
Reading Søren Kierkegaard today
Søren Kierkegaard wrote in 1813–1855, from Denmark — a world with different assumptions about authority, death and what a life is for. That distance is useful rather than a problem: it is what lets the ideas cut against assumptions you did not know you were making.
In thinkr, Søren Kierkegaard is one of 44 thinkers you can put a real question to, and the answers come back in that thinker's own voice and commitments rather than as a neutral summary. The 27 passages above are what the app draws on.
Working at roughly the same time
- Albert Camus — France/Algeria, 1913–1960
- Arthur Schopenhauer — Germany, 1788–1860
- Bertrand Russell — UK, 1872–1970
- Carl Jung — Switzerland, 1875–1961
- David Hume — Scotland, 1711–1776
- Friedrich Nietzsche — Germany, 1844–1900
Argues the same cases
Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry David Thoreau, Rainer Maria Rilke, René Descartes take positions on the same dilemmas as Søren Kierkegaard, which is usually where the disagreements become concrete.